WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: The Civil Rights movement in America, commemorated this week through observance of the birthday of Dr. King, and the Zionist movement for rebirth of homeland Jewish independence in Israel seem half-a-world distant. But are they? I cite this week two links – common inspiration to participants in both movements from heroes of each, and an incident about a play performed in Baltimore instead of in Washington, D.C.
Heroes and a Play Performance – Two Links Between the Civil Rights and Zionist Movements
Dr. King, whose birthday Americans rightly commemorated this past week, is among my half-dozen American heroes, half Jewish half not. What makes one’s heroes one’s heroes is not necessarily that they were personally involved in one’s cause, but that in championing their own cause they recognized early on there was an ignored injustice that had to be fought and fought it with a determination and dedication giving inspiration to challengers of other unrecognized or even popularly supported injustices.
My own Diaspora Jew cause is the Jewish people’s claim to the land of Israel, Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria included, as the just and historic homeland of Jews, a claim unpopular not just with Arabs and other Muslims, but with most of the world – the UN, the EU, “human rights” NGOs, the media, some liberal Christian churches, BDSers and the hard Left with its, alas, many Jews. Most of the six individuals I claim as my American heroes were not personally involved in the Jewish homeland cause, but their pioneer dedication to their own just but widely unpopular cause makes them inspirational to others contending against other just though unpopular causes.
Supporters of a cause need to start from a base, in our case the American Jewish community. If a genie had come out of a bottle in 1930 and given American Jews one wish that would enhance respect for themselves and in the eyes of most Americans, had I been there I’d have asked for a physically big man, a ballplayer, say in Henry Ford-tainted Michigan, hitting say 58 home runs in one season, with an unmistakably American and Jewish name, say for instance “Hank Greenberg.” If you haven’t seen the movie “The Life & Times of Hank Greenberg,” find a way to see it. Surveys of “the best Jewish athlete” miss the point. There’ve been many great athletes who are Jewish, but Greenberg said that the only time he felt like a hero was when he walked into a synagogue instead of the World Series field on Yom Kipper, and the congregation applauded. Greenberg was a hero to American Jews, and to Detroit Tigers fans, in a time and place in which American Jews really really needed a hero.
Maybe I never fully grew up, because two of my other heroes are also ballplayers. When I was a little kid there was a candy store across the street from our public school. It had a little table out front at which two kids could sit and drink Cokes and, by their lights, discuss important affairs of the day. I sat there with a young Black classmate one day, and began our conversation in the usual way: “Do you root for the Phillies or the A’s?” (In those days, our City of Brotherly Love, as it’s called, had two major league teams.) “I root for the Dodgers.” It was the same when I would go to Shibe Park with my father. There were more people, most but not all of them Black, rooting for Brooklyn. Years later, I understood. Over the years, I’ve read fair number of books about baseball. “The Boys of Summer,” natch, but still back when I was a kid a book by Jackie Robinson titled “Baseball Has Done It.” I’d thought it must be about the integration of major league baseball, but what it was actually about was the impact that the integration of major league baseball had on integration in American life.
My other ballplayer hero is Satchel Paige. I saw him pitch an inning once in his old age. He seemed to me all arms and legs. Leroy “Satchel” Paige was the best pitcher, by far, in baseball history. Joe Dimaggio was reputed to have said in his youth that he knew he’d make the majors when he got a hit off of Satchel Paige in an exhibition game. Satchel Paige is a symbol, par excellence, of very valuable things America lost through segregation.
Obsessed as I am with the poisoning of Western public perception of Jewish vs. Arab Palestine equities by the mainstream Western media’s loaded lexicon of anti-Israel reporting pejoratives, one of my chief non-American heroes is David Bar-Illan, late editor of the Jerusalem Post and its path-breaking “Eye On The Media” column. Andrea Levin of CAMERA, along with Sam Bahn, whom I know, and a handful of others, I flatter myself among them, are disciples of David Bar-Illan. Andrea’s one of my heroes (she knows this because I told her so in a one-on-one conversation) because she picked up the mantle of Bar-Illan back in the beginning, when the magnitude of media contempt for the Jewish state was but minimally appreciated, stuck with it and built a major anti-Israel media bias fighting organization, CAMERA.
Many years ago, before I became an officer of the century-old fraternal order Brith Sholom, I became a member of its “Israel” committee. I attended a small group meeting one night to which the chairman brought as a speaker the representative of another group belonging to the JCRC who’d told him a story. That story, which that guest speaker repeated to us, was that he’d complained to the publisher of the most popular European travel guide that its section on Israel was grossly unfair to that country and us. He said that that publisher had offered to discuss the matter with him if he’d come to the European book fair in Germany, which he did, after asking all the major American Jewish organizations to send a representative too, which none of them would. This guest speaker of ours went on that he’d been successful in Germany in getting the publisher’s travel guide section on Israel changed, and that when he got home the major Jewish organizations called him and asked, in his relating what had happened, not necessarily to mention that they’d declined to go with him. That Brith Sholom committee meeting guest speaker was Mort Klein, long now National President of the Zionist Organization of America, who has never waived in his and the ZOA’s support for the State of Israel in its full land of Israel boundaries, or lessened in the intensity of its support for our homeland.
Now, then, Dr. King. Everyone rightly remembers his monumental 1963 Lincoln Memorial [how appropriate] “I have a dream” speech about people being judged by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin, but the speech that got to me most was this truly American prophet’s speech on the next-to-last night of his life. He said: I’ve been to the mountain top, I’ve seen the promised land, that I may not get there with you, but we as a people will get there. Dr. King may never have heard of Theodor Herzl, but he agreed with Herzl that achieving justice necessitates more than having a dream, that if you will it through action, it becomes reality, not just a dream.
So these are my half-dozen American heroes – Hank Greenberg, Jackie Robinson, Satchel Paige, Andrea Levin, Mort Klein, Martin Luther King. Each of them recognized early on the need to confront a great injustice that the vast majority would not recognize or face, and each of them stayed the course in confronting it. What makes them our heroes is their inspiration to us.
I want to end with retelling an incident of American Jewish participation in Dr. King’s struggle early on, I do not know, but perhaps even before the involvement of Dr. King. Post-World War II days saw the culmination of Zionists’ long struggle to re-establish homeland independence of the Jewish people in Israel. American Jews involved themselves through both the Ben-Gurion-led Jewish Agency in Israel and the more militant Revisionist-wing Irgun Zva’i Leumi-associated American League for a Free Palestine. The American playwright Ben Hecht wrote an exceedingly moving production, “A Flag Is Born,” for the latter, starring Paul Muni.
The following is from a book I just reported on, Murray Greenfield’s The Jews Secret Fleet, on the Aliyah Bet, itself a physical confrontation of Jewish refugee-laden ships with British destroyers enforcing the British blockade barring Palestine to the Jews conducted very much in the manner of Dr. King’s civil rights marches in the American South. Pp 97-98:
“Scheduled to play for four weeks, the show [“A Flag Is Born”] extended its Broadway run to 10 weeks and then went on the road. Before opening in Boston on February 18, 1947, ‘A Flag is Born’ was scheduled to play in Washington, D.C. But racial segregation was the rule at the time in the nation’s capital, and the American League for a Free Palestine announced that it would not allow the play to be performed at the National Theatre if Blacks were barred from the better seats. The producers obtained a commitment for unsegregated seating from the Maryland Theatre in Baltimore and organized a special railroad car to bring members of Congress to the performance as their guests. The American League for a Free Palestine announced in a press release:
“’For the first time in the history of the State of Maryland, negroes were permitted to attend the legitimate theatre without discrimination. Negro segregation at the theatre was broken Tuesday, February 11th, when the Maryland Theatre sold orchestra and box seats to ‘A Flag is Born’ to anyone who asked for them without reference to race or color. About ten negroes witnessed the performance from choice seats.’
“Ben Hecht sent a telegram from Hollywood expressing satisfaction that his play served as ‘the instrument to break down one of the most un-American and undemocratic practices that has disgraced our country.’
“’The incident,’ Hecht said, ‘is forceful testimony to the proposition that to fight discrimination and injustice to one group of human beings affords protection to every other group.’”
I.e., the heroes of one inspire the workers of all.